by Anthony Bidulka
STONEHOUSE PUBLISHING
2024/$22.00/260 pp.
Philip Marlowe’s LA. Sherlock Holmes’s London. Merry Bell’s… Saskatoon? It may not spring to mind when you think of private eye mysteries, but Anthony Bidulka has already established the Hub City as a den of criminals and crime solvers. First came the Russell Quant mysteries, featuring a gay ex-cop with a taste for the finer things. Bidulka followed up these books with a two-book miniseries and several stand-alone titles, but last year he returned to the PI beat with Livingsky (the name of a thinly disguised version of Saskatoon) and Merry Bell, a trans woman trying to make a living as a detective while adjusting to life back in Saskatchewan after years in Vancouver.
From Sweetgrass Bridge picks up where Livingsky left off, with Merry scraping a meagre income from security guard gigs and living in a repurposed scrap yard office in Livingsky’s worst neighbourhood. She finally gets a break when homegrown Roughriders quarterback Dustin Walker goes missing near the banks of the South Saskatchewan. Did he fall into the river? Did he jump? Or… was he pushed? A mysterious client makes it Merry’s business to find out.
In the course of solving the mystery, Merry has to deal with many of the people we first met in Livingsky. They include her almost-nemesis police detective Veronica Greyeyes, her annoying office-mate Brenda—along with her crossdressing true-crime podcaster husband—and Gerald, her weirdly attractive landlord. Bidulka has a talent for creating characters who work as foils for his protagonist but who also come across as fully formed, interesting humans with their own pasts and motivations. A lot of the fun in Sweetgrass Bridge comes from putting yourself in Merry’s Christian Louboutin boots as she tries to figure out what makes all the other characters tick.
This book is decidedly not a procedural mystery. If you’re more interested in blood spatter and powder traces than you are in what it’s like to transition without any real support network, or in the life of a reserve kid in the “big city,” Sweetgrass Bridge isn’t for you. Bidulka writes people, not crime scenes.
That said, Sweetgrass Bridge handles the actual mystery and its solution with impressive panache. I can’t guarantee that you won’t pin the perp earlier than I did (you’re probably better at that than I am), but the sheer intricacy of the plot—replete with false starts, red herrings and lingering uncertainties—makes this a plot-driven book as much as a character-driven one.
What’s next for Merry? Will she be happy? Will she be rich (or at least less poor)? The future’s not ours to see, but it doesn’t take a sleuth to figure out that Bidulka will have another entertaining ride for us in the next Merry Bell mystery.
Alex Rettie is a long-time reviewer for Alberta Views.
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